1 - Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces

Summary

Space is only a medium, environment and means, an instrument and intermediary […] [It] never possesses existence in itself but always refers to something else, to existential and simultaneously essential time, subjective and objective […]

Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

The user's space is lived not represented (or conceived).

Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Immense credit is due to Henri Lefebvre for having inaugurated new itineraries of inquiry in critical and cultural theory in the aftermath of the Second World War. Enduring achievements are found in all of his myriad writings, but nowhere more than in his watershed Production of Space (1974), a monumental study in which he asserts that after the turmoil of 1968 a renewed awareness of space complicates inherited ways of calculating time. Space is no longer a neutral background against which humans move about, but is what humans produce as, in turn, it shapes or even produces them. It is both a medium in which things are fashioned and a milieu in which they find their place. Lefebvre correlatively offers a theory and a history of contemporary space coordinated according to the effects of uneven economic development, the advent of the modern State (generally in upper case), and the impact of the accelerated circulation of capital in the bourgeois sphere during the “Trente Glorieuses” or three decades of prosperity that France witnessed after 1945.

He argues that those in power, together with those in collusion with governmental agencies, impose spatial constraints that regiment the lived experience of entire populations.